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The First Matter, Form, Energy, Life, and Reason are identified with Nature, Nature withthe Universe, and the Universe with God.. And thisidea receives a further development from Bacon's

History of Modern Philosophy, by Alfred

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Title: History of Modern Philosophy

Author: Alfred William Benn

Release Date: November 11, 2010 [eBook #34283]

Language: English

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[Illustration: GIORDANO BRUNO

From the Statue in the Campo dei Fiori, Rome.]

HISTORY OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY

by

A W BENN,

Author of "The History of English Rationalism in the Nineteenth Century," Etc

[Illustration: GIORDANO BRUNO

From the Statue in the Campo dei Fiori, Rome.]

[ISSUED FOR THE RATIONALIST PRESS ASSOCIATION, LIMITED]

London: Watts & Co., 17 Johnson's Court, Fleet Street, E.C 1912

Printed by Watts and Co., Johnson's Court, Fleet Street, London, E.C

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I.

PAGE THE PHILOSOPHICAL RENAISSANCE 1

CHAPTER II.

THE METAPHYSICIANS 31

CHAPTER III.

THE THEORISTS OF KNOWLEDGE 65

CHAPTER IV.

THE GERMAN IDEALISTS 101

GIORDANO BRUNO Frontispiece

PAGE FRANCIS BACON 13

CHAPTER I.

THE PHILOSOPHICAL RENAISSANCE

For a thousand years after the schools of Athens were closed by Justinian philosophy made no real advance;

no essentially new ideas about the constitution of nature, the workings of mind, or the ends of life were putforward It would be false to say that during this period no progress was made The civilisation of the RomanEmpire was extended far beyond its ancient frontiers; and, although much ground was lost in Asia and Africa,more than the equivalent was gained in Northern Europe Within Europe also the gradual abolition of slaveryand the increasing dignity of peaceful labour gave a wider diffusion to culture, combined with a larger sense

of human fellowship than any but the best minds of Greece and Rome had felt Whether the status of womenwas really raised may be doubted; but the ideas and sentiments of women began to exercise an influence onsocial intercourse unknown before And the arts of war and peace were in some ways almost revolutionised.This remarkable phenomenon of movement in everything except ideas has been explained by the influence ofChristianity, or rather of Catholicism There is truth in the contention, but it is not the whole truth The Churchentered into a heritage that she did not create; she defined and accentuated tendencies that {2} long before heradvent had secretly been at work In the West that diffusion of civilisation which is her historic boast had beenbegun and carried far by the Rome whence her very name is taken In the East the title of orthodox by whichthe Greek Church is distinguished betrays the presence of that Greek thought which moulded her dogmas intological shape What is more, the very idea of right belief as a vital and saving thing came to Christianity fromPlatonism, accompanied by the persuasion that wrong belief was immoral and its promulgation a crime to bevisited by the penalty of death

Ecclesiastical intolerance has been made responsible for the speculative stagnation of the Middle Ages, and ithas been explained as an effect of the belief in the future punishment of heresy by eternal torments But intruth the persecuting spirit was responsible for the dogma, not the dogma for persecution And we must lookfor the underlying cause of the whole evil in the premature union of metaphysics with religion and moralityfirst effected by Plato, or rather by the genius of Athens working through Plato Indeed, on a closer

examination we shall find that the slowing-down of speculation had begun long before the advent of

Christianity, and coincides with the establishment of its headquarters at Athens, where also the first permanentschools of philosophy were established These schools were distinctly religious in their character; and nonewas so set against innovation as that of Epicurus, falsely supposed to have been a home of freethought In thelast Greek system of philosophy, Neo-Platonism, theology reigned supreme; and during the two and a-halfcenturies of its existence no real advance on the teaching of Plotinus was made {3}

Neo-Platonism when first constituted had incorporated a large Aristotelian element, the expulsion of whichhad been accomplished by its last great master, Proclus; and Christendom took over metaphysics under whatseemed a Platonic form the more welcome as Plato passed for giving its creeds the independent support ofpure reason This support extended beyond a future life and went down to the deepest mysteries of revealedfaith For, according to the Platonic doctrine of ideas, it was quite in order that there should be a divine unityexisting independently of the three divine persons composing it; that the idea of humanity should be combinedwith one of these persons; and that the same idea, being both one with and distinct from Adam, should involveall mankind in the guilt of his transgression Thus the Church started with a strong prejudice in favour of Platowhich continued to operate for many centuries, although the first great schoolman, John Scotus Eriugena(810-877), incurred a condemnation for heresy by adopting the pantheistic metaphysics of Neo-Platonism

As the Platonic doctrine of ideas came to life again in the realism, as it was called, of scholastic philosophy,

so the conflicting view of his old opponent Aristotle was revived under the form of conceptualism According

to this theory the genera and species of the objective world correspond to real and permanent distinctions inthe nature of things; but, apart from the conceptions by which they are represented in the intellect of God andman, those distinctions have no separate existence Aristotle's philosophy was first brought into Europe by the

Mohammedan conquerors of Spain, which became an important centre of learning in the earlier Middle Ages.Not a few Christian scholars went there to {4} study Latin translations were made from Arabic versions ofAristotle, and in this way his doctrines became more widely known to the lecture-rooms of the Catholicworld But their derivation from infidel sources roused a prejudice against them, still further heightened by the

circumstance that an Arabian commentator, Averroes, had interpreted the theology of the Metaphysics in a

pantheistic sense And on any sincere reading Aristotle denied the soul's immortality which Plato had upheld.Accordingly, all through the twelfth century Platonism still dominated religious thought, and even so late asthe early thirteenth century the study of Aristotle was still condemned by the Church

Nevertheless a great revolution was already in progress As a result of the capture of Constantinople by theCrusaders in A.D 1204 the Greek manuscripts of Aristotle's writings were brought to Paris, and at a

subsequent period they were translated into Latin under the direction of St Thomas Aquinas, the ablest of theschoolmen, who so manipulated the Peripatetic philosophy as to convert it from a battering-ram into a buttress

of Catholic theology a position still officially assigned to it at the present day Aristotelianism, however, didnot reign without a rival even in the later Middle Ages Aquinas was a Dominican; and the jealousy of thecompeting Franciscan Order found expression in maintaining a certain tradition of Platonism, represented indifferent ways by Roger Bacon (1214-1294) and by Duns Scotus (1265-1308) In this connection we have tonote the extraordinary fertility of the British islands in eminent thinkers during the Middle Ages Besides thetwo last mentioned there is Eriugena ("born in Ireland"), John of Salisbury {5} (1115-1180), the first

Humanist, William of Ockham, and Wycliffe, the first reformer making six in all, a larger contribution thanany other region of Europe, or indeed all the rest of Europe put together, has made to the stars of

Scholasticism This advantage is probably not due to any inherent genius for philosophy in the inhabitants ofthese islands, but to their relative immunity from war and to the political liberty that cannot but have beenfavourable to independent thought Five out of the six were more or less inclined to Platonism, and theiridealist or mystical tendencies were sometimes associated with the same practicality that distinguished theirmaster The sixth, commonly called Occam (died about 1349), is famous as the champion of

Nominalism that is, of the doctrine that genera and species have no real existence either in nature or in mind;there are only individuals more or less resembling one another He is the author of the famous saying the solelegacy of Scholasticism to common thought: "Entities ought not to be gratuitously multiplied" (entia non suntpræter necessitatem multiplicanda)

The capture of Constantinople by the Crusaders had led to Aristotle's triumph in the thirteenth century Twohundred years later the conquering Ottoman advance on the same city was the immediate cause of his

overthrow For the Byzantine scholars who fled for help and refuge to Italy brought with them the manuscripts

of Plato and Plotinus, and these soon became known to Western Europe through the Latin translations ofMarsilio Ficino On its literary side the Platonic revival fell in admirably with the Humanism to which theSchoolmen had long been intensely distasteful And the religious movement that preceded {6} Luther'sReformation found a welcome ally in Neo-Platonic mysticism At the same time the invention of printing, byopening the world of books to non-academic readers, vastly widened the possibilities of independent thought.And the Reformation, by discrediting the scholastic theology in Northern Europe, dealt another blow at thesystem with which it had been associated by Aquinas

It has been supposed that the discovery of America and the circumnavigation of the globe contributed also tothe impending philosophical revolution But the true theory of the earth's figure formed the very foundation ofAristotle's cosmology, and was as well known to Dante as to ourselves Made by a fervent Catholic, acting

under the patronage of the Catholic queen par excellence, the discovery of Columbus increased the prestige of

Catholicism by opening a new world to its missions and adding to the wealth of its supporters in the OldWorld

The decisive blow to medieval ideas came from another quarter from the Copernican astronomy What thetrue theory of the earth's motion meant for philosophy has not always been rightly understood It seems to becommonly supposed that the heliocentric system excited hostility because it degraded the earth from her

proud position as centre of the universe But the reverse is true According to Aristotle and his scholasticfollowers, the centre of the universe is the lowest and least honourable, the circumference the highest andmost distinguished position in it And that is why earth, as the vilest of the four elements, tends to the centre;while fire, being the most precious, flies upward Again, the incorruptible æther of which the heavens arecomposed shows its eternal character {7} by moving for ever round in a circle of which God, as Prime Mover,occupies the outermost verge And this metaphysical topography is faithfully followed by Dante, who evenimproves on it by placing the worst criminals (that is, the rebels and traitors Satan, with Judas and Brutus andCassius) in the eternal ice at the very centre of the earth Such fancies were incompatible with the new

astronomy No longer cold and dead, our earth might henceforth take her place among the stars, animated likethem if animated they were and suggesting by analogy that they too supported teeming multitudes of

reasonable inhabitants

But the transposition of values did not end here Aristotle's whole philosophy had been based on a radicalantithesis between the sublunary and the superlunary spheres the world of growth, decay, vicissitude, and theworld of everlasting realities In the sublunary sphere, also, it distinguished sharply between the Forms ofthings, which were eternal, and the Matter on which they were imposed, an intangible, evanescent thingrelated to Form as Possibility to Actuality We know that these two convenient categories are logically

independent of the false cosmology that may or may not have suggested their world-wide application But theimmediate effect of having it denied, or even doubted, was greatly to exalt the credit of Matter or Power at theexpense of Form or Act

The first to draw these revolutionary inferences from the Copernican theory was Giordano Bruno

(1548-1600) Born at Nola, a south Italian city not far from Naples, Bruno entered the Dominican Orderbefore the age of fifteen, and on that occasion exchanged his baptismal name of Filippo for that by which hehas ever since been known Here he became acquainted with the {8} whole of ancient and medieval

philosophy, besides the Copernican astronomy, then not yet condemned by the Church At the early age ofeighteen he first came into collision with the authorities; and at twenty-eight (1576) [McIntyre, pp 9-10] heopenly questioned the chief characteristic dogmas of Catholicism, was menaced with an action for heresy, andfled from the convent The pursuit must have been rather perfunctory, for Bruno found himself free to spendtwo years wandering from one Italian city to another, earning a precarious livelihood by tuition and

authorship Leaving Italy at last, rather from a desire to push his fortunes abroad than from any fear of

molestation, and finding France too hot to hold him, he tried Geneva for a little while, but, on being given tounderstand that he could only stay on the condition of embracing Calvinism, returned to France, where helived first for two years as Professor of Philosophy at Toulouse, and three more in a somewhat less officialposition at Paris Thence, in the train of the French ambassador, he passed to England, where his two years'sojourn seems to have been the happiest and most fruitful period of his restless career It was cut short by hischief's return to Paris But the philosopher's fearless advocacy of Copernicanism made that bigoted capitalimpossible The truth, however, seems to be that Bruno never could hit it off with anyone or any society; andthe next five years, spent in trying to make himself acceptable at one German university after another, are arecord of hopeless failure Finally, in an evil hour, he goes to Venice at the invitation of a young noble,Mocenigo, who, in revenge for disappointed expectations, betrays him to the Inquisition Questioned about hisheresies, Bruno showed perfect willingness to accept all the theological dogmas that {9} he had formerlydenied Whether he withdrew his retractation on being transferred from a Venetian to a Roman prison doesnot appear, as the Roman depositions are not forthcoming Neither is it clear why so long a delay as six years(1594-1600) was granted to the philosopher when such short work was made of other heretics It seems mostprobable that Bruno, while pliant enough on questions of religious belief, remained inflexible in maintainingthe infinity of inhabited worlds When the final condemnation was read out, he told the judges that he heard itwith less fear than they felt in pronouncing it In the customary euphemistic terms they had sent him to death

by fire At the stake, when the crucifix was held up to him, he turned away his eyes with what thoughts wecannot tell There is a monument to the heroic thinker at Nola, and another in the Campo dei Fiori on the spotwhere he suffered at Rome, raised against the strongest protests of the ecclesiastical authorities

The Greek-Italian philosophers the Pythagoreans and Parmenides had introduced the idea of finiteness orLimitation as a necessary condition of reality and perfection into thought From them it passed over to Platoand Aristotle, who made it dominant in the schools Epicurus and Lucretius had, indeed, carried on the olderIonian tradition of infinite atoms and infinite worlds dispersed through infinite space; but their philosophy waspractically atheistic, and the Church condemned it as both heretical and false Probably the discovery of theearth's globular shape had first suggested the idea of a finite universe to Parmenides; at any rate, the discovery

of the earth's motion suggested the idea of an infinite universe to his Greek-souled Italian successor; or rather

it was {10} the break-up of Aristotle's spherical world by Copernicanism that threw Bruno back as he gives

us himself to understand on the older Ionian cosmologies, with their assumption of infinite space and infiniteworlds In this reference Bruno went far beyond Copernicus, and even Kepler; for both had assumed, indeference to current opinion, that the fixed stars were equidistant from the solar system, and formed a singlesphere enclosing it on all sides He, on the contrary, anticipated modern astronomy in conceiving the stars as

so many suns dispersed without assignable limits through space, and each surrounded by inhabited planets.Infinite space had been closely associated by Democritus and Epicurus with infinite atoms; and the next greatstep taken by Bruno was to rehabilitate atomism as a necessary concept of modern science He figured theatoms as very minute spheres of solid earthy matter, forming by their combinations the framework of visiblebodies But their combinations are by no means fortuitous, as Democritus had impiously supposed; nor dothey move through an absolute void All space is filled with an ocean of liquid æther, which is no other thanthe quintessence of which Aristotle's celestial spheres were composed Only in Bruno's system it takes theplace of that First Matter which is the extreme antithesis of the disembodied Form personified in the PrimeMover, God And here we come to that reversal of cosmic values brought about by the reversal of the

relations between the earth and sun which Copernicus had effected The primordial Matter, so far from

passively receiving the Forms imposed on it from without, has an infinite capacity for evolving Forms fromits own bosom; and, so far {11} from being unspiritual, is itself the universal spirit, the creative and animatingsoul of the world The First Matter, Form, Energy, Life, and Reason are identified with Nature, Nature withthe Universe, and the Universe with God

So far all is clear, if not convincing It is otherwise with the theory of Monads This is only expounded inBruno's Latin works, for the most part ill-written and hopelessly obscure It seems possible that by the monadsBruno sometimes means the infinitesimal parts into which the æther of space may conceivably be divided.Each of these possesses consciousness, and therefore may be considered as reflecting and representing thewhole universe A number of monads, or rather a continuous portion of the æther surrounding and

interpenetrating a group of atoms, endows them with the forms and qualities of elementary bodies, ascendinggradually through vegetal and animal organisations to human beings But the animating process does not stopwith man The earth, with the other planets, the sun, and all the stars, are also monads on the largest scale,with reasonable souls, just as Aristotle thought In fact, the old mythology whence he derived the idea repeatsitself in his great enemy Bruno

Beyond and above all these partial unities is the Monas Monadum the supreme unity, the infinite God who isthe soul of the infinite universe Doubtless there is here a reminiscence of the Neo-Platonic One, the ineffableAbsolute, beyond all existence, yet endowed with the infinite power whence all existence proceeds Bruno hadlearned from Cardinal Nicolas of Cusa a Copernican before Copernicus to recognise the principle of

Heracleitus that opposites are one; and in this instance he applies it with brilliant audacity; for every

infinitesimal {12} part of the space-filling æther is no less the soul of the universe than the Monad of Monadsitself And both agree in being non-existent in the sense of being transfinite, since there can be no sum ofinfinity and no animated mathematical points

From Anaximander to Plotinus there is hardly a great Greek thinker whose influence cannot be traced in thesystem of Giordano Bruno And while he represents the philosophical Renaissance in this eminent degree, heheads the two lines of speculation which, separately or combined, run through the whole history of modernmetaphysics the monistic, and what is now called the pluralistic tendency With none, except, perhaps, with

Hegel, have the two been perfectly balanced; and in Bruno himself the leaning is distinctly towards plurality,his Supreme Monad being a mere survival from the Neo-Platonic One.

FRANCIS BACON

Francis Bacon (1561-1626) was by profession a lawyer, by taste a scientific inquirer, by character a seekerafter wealth and power, by natural genius an immortal master of words He began life as the friend, adviser,and client of Elizabeth's favourite, the Earl of Essex When that unfortunate courtier, in disregard of hiswarnings, rushed into a treasonable enterprise, Bacon appeared as one of the most zealous of the counsel forthe prosecution Strictly speaking, this may have been his duty as a loyal subject of the Queen; it was hardlyhis duty, even on the Queen's commission, after Essex's execution, to assist in the composition of a pamphletblackening the memory of his former friend and patron In the next reign Bacon paid assiduous court to Jamesand his favourites {13}

[Illustration: FRANCIS BACON

(Copyright B P C.)]

{14} When the first of these, Somerset, fell and was tried on a charge of murder, he conducted the

prosecution, and, finding the evidence insufficient, suggested to James that the prisoner should be entrappedinto a confession by dangling a false promise of forgiveness before his eyes Bacon owed his final exaltation

to Buckingham, and as Lord Keeper allowed himself to be made the tool of that bad man for the perversion ofjustice A suit was brought before him by a young man against a fraudulent trustee (his own uncle) for therestitution of a sum of money Bacon gave sentence for the plaintiff Buckingham then intervened with ademand that the case should be retried "Upon this Bacon saw the parties privately, and, annulling all thedeliberate decisions of the Court, compelled the youth to assent to the ceasing of all proceedings, and toaccept" a smaller sum than he was entitled to (E A Abbott) On another occasion he exercised his judicialauthority in a way that did not square with Buckingham's wishes, but quite legitimately and without anyconsciousness of giving offence; whereupon the insolent favourite addressed him in a letter filled with

outrageous abuse, to which Bacon replied in terms of abject submission This meanness had its reward, for in

1618 the philosopher became Lord Chancellor

After a three years' tenure Bacon was flung from his high position by a charge of judicial corruption, to thetruth of every count in which he confessed The question is very complicated, obscure, and much

controverted, not admitting of discussion within the limits here assigned On the subject of Bacon's

truthfulness, however, a word must be said The Chancellor admitted having taken presents from suitors, but{15} denied having ever let his judgments be influenced thereby; and his word seems to be generally accepted

as a sufficient exoneration But its value may be doubted in view of two statements quoted by Dean Church

Of these "one was made in the House of Commons by Sir George Hastings, a member of the House, who had

been the channel of Awbry's gift [made to the Chancellor pendente lite], that when he had told Bacon that if

questioned he must admit it, Bacon's answer was: 'George, if you do so, I must deny it, upon my

honour upon my oath.' The other was that he had given an opinion in favour of some claim of the Masters inChancery, for which he received £1,200, and with which he said that all the judges agreed an assertion whichall the judges denied Of these charges there is no contradiction." The denial of Bacon that he ever allowed hisjudgments to be influenced by bribes, and his assertion that he was the justest judge since his own father,cannot, then, count for much As to the plea that the justice of his sentences was never challenged, who was tochallenge it? The successful suitor would hold his tongue; and the unsuccessful suitor could hardly be

expected to complete his own ruin by going to law again on the strength of the Chancellor's condemnation.Bacon, at any rate, knew quite well that to take presents before judgment was wrong and criminal, as hisanswer to Egerton sufficiently shows an answer which also fully disposes of the plea that to take such

presents was the common custom of the age Moreover, had such been the common custom, Bacon might

have taken his trial and pleaded it as a sufficient apology or extenuation for his own conduct This would havebeen a somewhat more dignified course {16} than the one he actually pursued, which was to plead guilty toall the charges, throwing himself on the mercy of the Lords It has been suggested that he did this at the desire

of his powerful patrons, whose malpractices might have been brought to light by a public investigation As hispunishment was immediately remitted, some arrangement with the King and Buckingham seems probable.But for an innocent man to have saved himself by a false acknowledgment of guilt would, as Macaulay shows,have been still more infamous than to take bribes

The desperate efforts of some apologists to whitewash Bacon are apparently due to a very exaggerated

estimate of his services to mankind Other critics give themselves the pleasure of painting what has beencalled a Rembrandt portrait, with noon on the forehead and night at the heart And a third class argue from arotten morality to a rotten intelligence In fact, Bacon as little deserves to be called the wisest and greatest asthe meanest of mankind He really loved humanity, and tried hard to serve it, devoting a truly philosophicalintellect to that end The service was to consist in an immense extension of man's power over nature, to beobtained by a complete knowledge of her secrets; and this knowledge he hoped to win by reforming themethods of scientific investigation Unfortunately, intellect alone proved unequal to that mighty task Baconpasses, and not without good grounds, for a great upholder of the principle that truth can only be learned byexperience But his philosophy starts by setting that principle at defiance He who took all knowledge for hisprovince omitted from his survey the rather important subject of knowledge itself, its limits and its laws Hadhis attention {17} been drawn that way, the very first requisite, on empirical principles, would have been totake stock of the leading truths already ascertained But the enormous vanity of the amateur reformer seems tohave persuaded him that these amounted to little or nothing The later Renaissance was an age of intensescientific activity, conditioned, in the first instance, by a revival of Greek learning Already before the middle

of the sixteenth century great advance had been made in algebra, trigonometry, astronomy, mineralogy,

botany, anatomy, and physiology Before the publication of the Novum Organum Napier had invented

logarithms, Galileo was reconstituting physics, Gilbert had created the science of magnetism, and Harvey haddiscovered the circulation of the blood These were facts that Bacon took no pains to study; he either ignores

or slights or denies the work done by his illustrious predecessors and contemporaries That he rejected theCopernican theory with scorn is an exaggeration; but he never accepted it, notwithstanding arguments that thebest astronomers of his time found convincing; and the longer he lived the more unfavourable became hisopinion of its merits And it is certain that Tycho Brahe's wonderful mass of observations, with the splendidgeneralisations based on them by Kepler, are never mentioned in his writings Now what really ruined

Aristotelianism was the heliocentric astronomy, as Bruno perfectly saw; and ignorance of this left Bacon afterall in the bonds of medieval philosophy

We have seen in studying Bruno that the very soul of Aristotle's system was his distinction between form andmatter, and this distinction Bacon accepted without examination from scholasticism The purpose of his {18}life was to ascertain by what combination of forms each particular body was constituted, and then, by

artificially superinducing them on some portion of matter, to call the desired substance into existence Hiscelebrated inductive method was devised as a means to that end To discover the forms "we are instructed first

to draw up exhaustive tables of the phenomena and forms under investigation, and then to exclude from our

list any 'form' which does not invariably co-exist with the phenomenon of which the form is sought For

example, if we are trying to discover the form of heat it will not do to adduce 'celestial nature'; for, though the

sun's light is hot, that of the moon is cold After a series of such exclusions, Bacon believed that a single form

would finally remain to be the invariable cause of the phenomenon investigated, and of nothing else" (F C S.Schiller)

As Dr Schiller observes, this method of exclusions is not new; nor, indeed, does Bacon claim to have

originated it; at least he observes in his Novum Organum that it had been already employed by Plato to a

certain extent for the purpose of discussing definitions and ideas And elsewhere he praises Plato as "a man(and one that surveyed all things from a lofty cliff) for having discerned in his doctrine of Ideas that Formswere the true object of knowledge; howsoever he lost the fruit of this most true opinion by considering and

trying to apprehend Forms as absolutely abstracted from matter, whence it came that he turned aside totheological speculations." Bacon must have known that this reproach does not apply to Aristotle; as, indeed,the very schoolmen knew that he did not except in the single case of God give Forms a separate {19}existence But, probably from jealousy, he specially hated Aristotle, and in this particular instance the

Stagirite more particularly excited his hostility by identifying Forms with Final Causes These Bacon rathercontemptuously handed over to the sole cognisance of theology as consecrated virgins bearing no fruit As apoint of scientific method this condemnation of teleology is quite unjustified even in the eyes of inquirers whoreject the theological argument from design To a Darwinian, purpose means survival value, and the parts of

an organism are so many utilities evolved in the action and reaction between living beings and their

environment But Bacon disliked any theory tending to glorify the existing arrangements of nature as perfectand unalterable achievements, for the good reason that it threatened to discountenance his own scheme forpractically creating the world over again with exclusive reference to the good of humanity Thus in his Utopia,

the New Atlantis, there are artificial mines, producing artificial metals, plants raised without seeds,

contrivances for turning one tree or plant into another, for prolonging the lives of animals after the removal ofparticular organs, for making "a number of kinds of serpents, worms, flies, fishes of putrefaction; whereofsome are advanced to be perfect creatures like beasts or birds"; with flying-machines, submarines, and

perpetual motions in short, a general anticipation of Jules Verne and Mr H G Wells

Such dreams, however, do not entitle Bacon to be regarded as a true prophet of modern science and modernmechanical inventions In themselves his ideas do not go beyond the magic of the Middle Ages, or rather ofall ages The original thing was his {20} Method; and this Method, considered as a means for surprising thesecrets of nature, we know to be completely chimerical, because there are no such Forms as he imagined, to

be enucleated by induction, with or without the Method of Exclusion The truth is that the inductive methodwhich he borrowed from Socrates and Plato was originally created by Athenian philosophy for the humanisticstudies of law, morality, æsthetics, and psychology Physical science, on the other hand, should be

approached, as the Greeks rightly felt, through the door of mathematics, an instrument of whose potency thegreat Chancellor notoriously had no conception Thus his prodigious powers would have been much more

usefully devoted to moral philosophy As it is, the Essays alone remain to show what great things he might

have done by limiting himself to the subjects with which they deal The famous logical and physical treatises,

the Novum Organum and the De Augmentis, notwithstanding their wealth and splendour of language, are to us

at the present day less living than the fragments of early Greek thought, than most of Plato, than much ofAristotle, than Atomism as expounded by Lucretius

Macaulay rests his claim of the highest place among philosophers for Bacon not on his inductive theory, towhich the historian rightly denies any novelty, but on the new purpose and direction that the search for

knowledge is assumed to have received from his teaching On this view the whole of modern science has beencreated by the desire to convert nature into an instrument for the satisfaction of human wants an ambition

dating from the publication of the Novum Organum The claim will not stand, for two reasons The first is that

the great movement of modern science {21} began at least half a century before Bacon's birth, growingrapidly during his life, but without his knowledge, and continuing its course without being perceptibly

accelerated by his intervention ever since The one man of science who most commonly passes for his disciple

is Robert Boyle (1627-1691) But Boyle did not read the Novum Organum before he was thirty, whereas,

residing at Florence before fifteen, he received a powerful stimulus from the study of Galileo And his

chemistry was based on the atomic theory which Bacon rejected

The second reason for not accepting Macaulay's claim is that in modern Europe no less than in ancient Greecethe great advances in science have only been made by those who loved knowledge for its own sake, or, if theexpression be preferred, simply for the gratification of their intellectual curiosity No doubt their discoverieshave added enormously to the utilities of life; but such advantages have been gained on the sole condition ofnot making them the primary end in view The labours of Bacon's own contemporaries, Kepler and Gilbert,have led to the navigation of the sea by lunar distances, and to the various industrial applications of

electro-magnetism; but they were undertaken without a dream of these remote results And in our own day the

greatest of scientific triumphs, which is the theory of evolution, was neither worked out with any hope ofmaterial benefits to mankind nor has it offered any prospect of them as yet The same may be said of modernsidereal astronomy From the humanist point of view it would not be easy to justify the enormous expenditure

of energy, money, and time that this science has absorbed The schoolmen have been much ridiculed fordiscussing the question how {22} many angels could dance on the point of a needle; but as a purely

speculative problem it surely merits as much attention as the total number of the stars, the rates of theirvelocities, or the law of their distribution through space A schoolman might even have urged in justification

of his curiosity that some of us might feel a reasonable curiosity about the exact size if size they have ofbeings with whom we hope to associate one day; whereas by the confession of the astronomers themselvesneither we nor our descendants can ever hope to verify by direct measurement the precarious guesses of theirscience in this branch of celestial statics and dynamics

THOMAS HOBBES

It has been shown that one momentous effect of the Copernican astronomy, as interpreted by Giordano Bruno,was to reverse the relative importance ascribed in Aristotle's philosophy to the two great categories of Powerand Act, giving to Power a value and dignity of which it had been stripped by the judgment of Plato andAristotle Even Epicurus, when he rehabilitated infinite space, had been careful as a moralist to urge theexpediency of placing a close limitation on human desires, denouncing the excesses of avarice and ambitionmore mildly but not less decisively than the contemporary Stoic school Thus Lucretius describes his master

as travelling beyond the flaming walls of the world only that he may bring us back a knowledge of the fixedbarrier set by the very laws of existence to our aspirations and hopes

The classic revival of the Renaissance did not bring back the Greek spirit of moderation On the contrary, thenew world, the new astronomy, the new monarchy, {23} and the new religion combined to create such a sense

of Power, in contradistinction to Act, as the world had never before known For us this new feeling hasreceived its most triumphant artistic expression from Shakespeare and Milton, for France from Rabelais, forItaly from Ariosto and Michelangelo In philosophy Bacon strikes the same note when he values knowledge

as a source of power knowledge which for Greek philosophy meant rather a lesson in self-restraint And thisidea receives a further development from Bacon's chief successor in English philosophy, Thomas Hobbes(1588-1679), in whose system love of power figures as the very essence of human nature, the self-consciousmanifestation of that Motion which is the real substance of the physical world

Hobbes was a precocious child, and received a good school training; but the five years he spent at Oxfordadded nothing to his information, and a continental tour with the young heir of the Cavendishes had no othereffect than to convince him of the general contempt into which the scholasticism still taught at Oxford hadfallen On returning to England, he began his studies over again in the Cavendish library, acquiring a thoroughfamiliarity with the classic literature of Greece and Rome, a deep hatred (imbibed through Thucydides) ofdemocracy, and a genuinely antique theory that the State should be supreme in religious no less than in civilmatters Amid these studies Hobbes occasionally enjoyed the society of Bacon, then spending his last years inthe retirement of Gorhambury As secretary and Latin translator he proved serviceable to the ex-Chancellor,but remained quite unaffected by his inductive and experimental philosophy Indeed, the determining impulse

of his {24} speculative activity came from the opposite quarter Going abroad once more as travelling tutor, atthe age of forty, he chanced on a copy of Euclid in a gentleman's library lying open at the famous

Forty-Seventh Proposition His first impulse was to reject the theorem as impossible; but, on going backwardsfrom proposition to proposition, he laid down the book not only convinced, but "in love with geometry."Beginning so late in life, his ulterior studies led Hobbes into the belief that he had squared the circle, besidesthe far more pernicious error of applying the deductive method of geometry to the solution of political

problems Could he and Bacon have exchanged philosophies, the brilliant faculties of each might have beenemployed to better purpose The categories of Form and Matter, combined with the logic of elimination andtentative generalisation, would have found a fitting field for their application in the familiar facts of human

nature But those facts refused to be treated as so many wheels, pulleys, and cords in a machine for crushingthe life out of society and transmitting the will of a single despot unresisted through its whole extent; for such

is a faithful picture of what a well-governed community, as Hobbes conceived it, ought to be During hissecond residence abroad he had become acquainted with the physical philosophy of Galileo the theory thatregards every change in the external or phenomenal world as a mere rearrangement of matter and motion,matter being an aggregate of independent molecules held together by mechanical pressure and impact Thecomponent parts of this aggregate become known to us by the impressions their movements produce on oursenses, traces of which {25} are preserved in memory, and subsequently recalled by association Languageconsists of signs conventionally affixed to such images; only the signs, standing as they do for all objects of acertain sort, have a universal value, not possessed by the original sensations, through which reasoning

becomes possible Hobbes had evidently fallen in love with algebra as well as with geometry; and it is on thetype of algebraic reasoning in other words, on the type of rigorous deduction that his logic is constructed.And such a view of the way in which knowledge advances seemed amply justified by the scientific triumphs

of his age But his principle that all motion originates in antecedent motion, although plausible in itself andoccasionally revived by ingenious speculators, has not been verified by modern science Gravitation,

cohesion, and chemical affinity have, so far, to be accepted as facts not resoluble into more general facts.Hobbes died before the great discoveries of Newton which first turned away men's minds from the purelymechanical interpretation of energy

That mechanical interpretation led our philosopher to reject Aristotle's notion of sociality as an essentiallyhuman characteristic To him this seemed a mere occult quality, the substitution of a word for an explanation

The counter-view put forth in his great work, Leviathan, is commonly called atomistic But it would be gross

flattery to compare the ultimate elements of society, as Hobbes conceived them, to the molecules of modernscience, which attract as well as repel each other; or even with the Democritean atoms, which are at leastneutral According to him, the tendency to self-preservation, shared by men with all other beings, takes theform of an insatiable appetite {26} for power, leading each individual to pursue his own aggrandisement atthe cost of any loss or suffering to the rest And he tries to prove the permanence of this impulse by referring

to the precautions against robbery taken by householders and travellers Aristotle had much more justlymentioned the kindnesses shown to travellers as a proof of how widely goodwill is diffused Our countryman,with all his acuteness, strangely ignores the necessity as a matter of prudence of going armed and locking thedoor at night, even if the robbers only amounted to one in a thousand of the population Modern researcheshave shown that there are very primitive societies where the assumed war of all against each is unknown,predatory conflicts being a mark of more advanced civilisation, and the cause rather than the effect of

anti-social impulses

Granting an original state of anarchy and internecine hostility, there is, according to Hobbes, only one way out

of it, which is a joint resolution of the whole community to surrender their rights of individual sovereigntyinto the hands of one man, who thenceforth becomes absolute ruler of the State, with authority to defend itscitizens against mutual aggressions, and the whole community against attacks from a foreign Power Thisagreement constitutes the famous Social Contract, of which so much was to be heard during the next centuryand a-half It holds as between the citizens themselves, but not between the subjects and their sovereign, forthat would be admitting a responsibility which there is no power to enforce And anyone refusing to obey thesovereign justly forfeits his life; for he thereby returns to the State of Nature, where any man that likes maykill his neighbour if he can

All this theory of an original institution of the State {27} by contract impresses a modern reader as utterlyunhistorical But its value, if any, does not depend on its historical truth Even if the remote ancestors of theseventeenth-century Europeans had surrendered all their individual rights, with certain trifling exceptions, intothe hands of an autocrat, no sophistry could show that their mutual engagements were binding on the subjects

of Charles I and Louis XIV And it is really on expediency, understood in the largest sense, that the claims ofthe New Monarchy are based by Hobbes What he maintains is that nothing short of a despotic governmentexercised by one man can save society from relapsing into chaos But even under this amended form the

theory remains amenable to historical criticism Had Hobbes pursued his studies beyond Thucydides, hewould have found that other polities besides the Athenian democracy broke down at the hour of trial Aboveall, Roman Imperialism, which seems to have been his ideal, failed to secure its subjects either against internaldisorder or against foreign invasion.

Democracy, however, was not the sole or the worst enemy dreaded by the author of Leviathan as a competitor

with his "mortal god." In the frontispiece of that work the deified monarch who holds the sword erect with hisright hand grasps the crozier with his left, thus typifying the union of the spiritual and temporal powers in thesame person The publicists of the Italian Renaissance, with their classical ideals, had, indeed, been as

anti-papal as the Protestants; and the political disorders fomented by the agents of the Catholic reaction duringthe last hundred years had given Hobbes an additional reason for perpetuating their point of view Meanwhileanother menace to {28} public order had presented itself from an opposite quarter Calvinism had created anew spiritual power based on the free individual interpretation of Scripture, in close alliance with the allegedrights of conscience and with the spirit of republican liberty Each creed in turn had attacked the Stuart

monarchy, and the second had just effected its overthrow Therefore, to save the State it was necessary thatreligious creeds, no less than codes of conduct, should be dictated by the secular authority, enslaving men'sminds as well as their bodies

By the dialectic irony of the speculative movement, this attempt to fetter opinion was turned into an

instrument for its more complete emancipation In order to discredit the pretensions of the religious zealots,Hobbes made a series of attacks on the foundations of their faith, mostly by way of suggestion and

innuendo no more being possible under the conditions then obtaining -but with such effect that, according to

Macaulay, "for many years the Leviathan was the gospel of cold-blooded and hard-headed unbelievers." That

one who made religious belief a matter to be fixed by legislation could be in any sense a Christian seems mostunlikely He professed, with what sincerity we know not, to regard the existence of God as something only afool could deny But his philosophy from beginning to end forms a rigorously-thought-out system of

materialism which any atheist, if otherwise it satisfied him, might without inconsistency accept

On the meeting of the Long Parliament, Hobbes again left England for the Continent, where he remained foreleven years But his principles were no more to the taste of the exiled royalists than of {29} their opponents

He therefore returned once more to England, made his submission to the Parliament, and spent the rest of hisdays, practically unmolested by either party, under the Commonwealth and the Restoration until his death in

1679 at the age of ninety-one

It may be said of Hobbes, as of Bacon, that the intellect at work is so amazing and the mass of literary

performance so imposing that the illusions of historians about the value of their contributions to the progress

of thought are excusable Nevertheless, it cannot be too distinctly stated that the current or academic estimate

of these great men as having effected a revolution in physical and moral science is wrong They stand as muchapart from the true line of evolution as do the gigantic saurians of a remote geological period whose remainsexcite our wonder in museums of natural history Their systems proved as futile as the monarchies of Philip II.and of Louis XIV Bacon's dreams are no more related to the coming victories of science than Raleigh's ElDorado was to the future colonial empire of Britain Hobbes had better fortune than Strafford, in so far as hekept his head on his shoulders; but the logic of his absolutism shrivelled up under the sun of English libertylike the great Minister's policy of Thorough

The theory of a Social Contract is a speculative idea of the highest practical importance But the idea ofcontract as the foundation of morals goes back to Epicurus, and it is assumed in a more developed form by

Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity Its potency as a revolutionary instrument comes from the reinterpretations of Locke and Rousseau, which run directly counter to the assumptions of the Leviathan {30}

Hobbes shares with Bacon the belief that all knowledge comes from experience, besides making it clearerthan his predecessor that experience of the world comes through external sense alone Here also there can be

no claim to originality, for more than one school of Greek philosophy had said the same As an element ofsubsequent thought, more importance belongs to the idea of Power, which was to receive its full developmentfrom Spinoza; but only in association with other ideas derived from the philosopher whom we have next toexamine, the founder of modern metaphysics, Descartes.

* * * * *

{31}

CHAPTER II.

THE METAPHYSICIANS

DESCARTES, MALEBRANCHE, SPINOZA, LEIBNIZ

René Descartes (1596-1650) was a Frenchman, born in Touraine, and belonging by family to the inferiornobility Educated at the Jesuit college of La Flèche, he early acquired a distaste for the scholastic philosophy,

or at least for its details; the theology of scholasticism, as we shall see, left a deep impression on him throughlife On leaving college he took up mathematics, varied by a short plunge into the dissipations of Paris Someyears of military service as a volunteer with the Catholic armies at the beginning of the Thirty Years' Warenabled him to travel and see the world Returning to Paris, he resumed his studies, but found them seriously

interrupted by the tactless bores who, as we know from Molière's amusing comedy Les Fâcheux, long

continued to infest French society To escape their assiduities Descartes, who prized solitude before all things,fled the country The inheritance of an independent income enabled the philosopher to live where he liked;and Holland became, with a few interruptions, his chosen residence for the next twenty years (1629-49) Evenhere frequent changes of residence and occasional concealment of his address were necessary in order to eludethe visits of importunate admirers With all his unsociability there seems to have {32} been something

singularly magnetic about the personality of Descartes; yet he only fell in with one congenial spirit, thePrincess Elizabeth, daughter of the unfortunate Winter King and granddaughter of our James I Possessing tothe fullest extent the intellectual brilliancy and the incomparable charm of the Stuart family, this great ladyimpressed the lonely thinker as the only person who ever understood his philosophy

Another royal friendship brought his career to an untimely end Queen Christina of Sweden, the gifted andrestless daughter of Gustavus Adolphus, heard of Descartes, and invited him to her Court On his arrival shesent for the pilot who had brought the illustrious stranger to Stockholm and questioned him about his

passenger "Madame," he replied, "it is not a man whom I conducted to your Majesty, but a demi-god Hetaught me more in three weeks of the science of seamanship and of winds and navigation than I had learned in

the sixty years I had been at sea" (Miss E S Haldane's Life of René Descartes) The Queen fully came up to

the expectations of her visitor, in whose eyes she had no fault but an unfortunate tendency to waste her time

on learning Greek Besides her other merits, she possessed "a sweetness and goodness which made mendevoted to her service." It soon appeared that, as with others of the same rank, this was only the veneer of aheartless selfishness Christina, who was an early riser, required his attendance in her library to give herlessons in philosophy at five o'clock in the morning Descartes was by habit a very late riser Besides, he hadnot even a lodging in the royal palace, but was staying at the French Embassy, and in going there "had to passover a long bridge which was always bitterly cold." The cold {33} killed him He had arrived at Stockholm inOctober, and meant to leave in January; but remained at the urgent request of the Queen, who, however, made

no change in the hour of their interviews, although that winter was one of the severest on record At thebeginning of February, 1650, he fell ill and died of inflammation of the lungs on the 11th, in the fifty-fourthyear of his age

Descartes had the physical courage which Hobbes lacked; but he seems, like Bacon, to have been a moralcoward The most striking instance of this is that, on hearing of Galileo's condemnation for teaching theheliocentric astronomy, he withheld from publication and had even thoughts of destroying a work of his own

in which the same doctrine was maintained This was at a time when he was living in a country where therecould be no question of personal danger from the Inquisition But something of the same weakness showsitself in his running away from France to escape those intrusions on his studious retirement which one wouldthink might have been checked by letting it be known with sufficient firmness that his hours could not bewasted on idle conversation And we have seen how at last his life was lost for no better reason than the dread

of giving offence to Queen Christina

It seems strange that a character so unheroic should figure among the great emancipators of human thought Infact, Descartes's services to liberty have been much exaggerated His intellectual fame rests on three

foundations Of these the most indubitable is the creation of analytical geometry, the starting-point of modernmathematics The value of his contributions to physics has been much disputed; but, on the whole, expertopinion seems to have decided that what was new in them was not true, and what was true was not new.However, the place we must assign Descartes in the history of philosophy can only be determined by ouropinion of his metaphysics

{34}

[Illustration: RENÉ DESCARTES.]

{35} As a philosopher Descartes has, to begin with, the merit of exemplary clearness The fault is not with

him if we cannot tell what he thought and how he came to think it The classic Discourse on Method (1637)

relates his mental history in a style of almost touching simplicity It appears that from an early age truth hadbeen his paramount object, not as with Bacon and Hobbes for its utility, but for its own sake In search of thisideal he read widely, but without finding what he wanted The great and famous works of literature mightentertain or dazzle; they could not convince The philosophers professed to teach truth; their endless disputesshowed that they had not found it Mathematics, on the other hand, presented a pleasing picture of

demonstrated certainty, but a certainty that seemed to be prized only as a sure foundation for the mechanicalarts Wearily throwing his books aside, the young man then applied himself to the great book of life, minglingwith all sorts and conditions of men to hear what they had to say about the prime interests of existence Butthe same vanity and vexation of spirit followed him here Men were no more agreed among themselves thanwere the authorities of his college days The truths of religion seemed, indeed, to offer a safe refuge; but theywere an exception that proved the rule; being, as Descartes observes, a supernatural revelation, not the naturalknowledge that he wanted

The conflict of authorities had at least one good result, which was to discredit the very notion of {36}

authority, thus throwing the inquirer back on his own reason as the sole remaining resource And as

mathematics seemed, so far, to be the only satisfactory science, the most reasonable course was to give awider extension and application to the methods of algebra and geometry Four fundamental rules were thusobtained: (1) To admit nothing as true that was not evidently so; (2) to analyse every problem into as manydistinct questions as the nature of the subject required; (3) to ascend gradually from the simplest to the mostcomplex subjects; and (4) to be sure that his enumerations and surveys were so exhaustive and complete as tolet no essential element of the question escape

The rules as they stand are ill-arranged, vague, and imperfect The last should come first and the first last Thenotions of simplicity, complexity, and truth are neither illustrated nor defined And no pains are taken todiscriminate judgments from concepts It may be said that the method worked well; at least Descartes tells usthat with the help of his rules he made rapid progress in the solution of mathematical problems We maybelieve in his success without admitting that an inferior genius could have achieved the same results by thesame means The real point is to ascertain whether the method, whatever its utility in mathematics, could beadvantageously applied to metaphysics And the answer seems to be that as manipulated by its author the newsystem led to nothing but hopeless fallacies

After reserving a provisional assent to the customs of the country where he happens to be residing and to thecreed of the Roman Church, Descartes begins by calling in question the whole mass of beliefs he has {37}hitherto accepted, including the reality of the external world But the very act of doubt implies the existence ofthe doubter himself I think, therefore I am It has been supposed that the initial affirmation of this self-evidentprinciple implies that Descartes identified Being with Thought He did no such thing No more is meant, tobegin with, than that, whatever else is or is not, I the thinker certainly am This is no great discovery; theinteresting thing is to find out what it implies A good deal according to Descartes First he infers that, since

the act of thinking assures him of his existence, therefore he is a substance the whole essence of which

consists in thought, which is independent of place and of any material object in short, an immaterial soul,entirely distinct from the body, easier to know, and capable of existing without it Here the confusion ofconception with judgment is apparent, and it leads to a confusion of our thoughts about reality with the

realities themselves And Descartes carries this loose reasoning a step further by going on to argue that, as thecertainty of his own existence has no other guarantee than the clearness with which it is inferred from the fact

of his thinking, it must therefore be a safe rule to conclude that whatever things we conceive very clearly anddistinctly are all true

In his other great philosophical work, the Meditations, Descartes sets out at greater length, but with less

clearness, his arguments for the immateriality of the soul Here it is fully admitted that, besides thinking,self-consciousness covers the functions of perceiving, feeling, desiring, and willing; nor does it seem to bepretended that these experiences are reducible to forms of thought But it is claimed that they depend on {38}thought in the sense that without thought one would not be aware of their existence; whereas it can easily beconceived without them A little more introspection would show that the second part of the assertion is nottrue; for there is no thought without words, and no words, however inaudibly articulated, without a number oftactual and muscular sensations, nor even without a series of distinct volitions

Another noticeable point is that, so far from obeying the methodical rule to proceed from the simple to thecomplex, Descartes does just the contrary Starting with the whole complex content of consciousness, heworks down by a series of arbitrary rejections to what, according to him, is the simple fact of immaterialthought Let us see how it fares with his attempt to reconstruct knowledge on that elementary basis

Returning to his postulate of universal doubt, our philosopher argues from this to an imperfection in hisnature, and thence to the idea of a perfect being The reasoning is most slipshod; for, even admitting thatknowledge is preferable to ignorance which has not been proved it does not follow that the dogmatist ismore perfect than the doubter Indeed, one might infer the contrary from Descartes's having passed withprogressive reflection from the one stage to the other Overlooking the paralogism, let us grant that he has theidea of a perfect being, and go on to the question of how he came to possess it One might suggest that theconsciousness of perfect self-knowledge, combined with the wish to know more of other subjects, would besufficient to create an ideal of omniscience, and, proceeding in like manner from a comparison of wants withtheir satisfactions, to enlarge this ideal into the {39} notion of infinite perfection all round Descartes,

however, is not really out for truth at least, not in metaphysics; he is out for a justification of what the Jesuitshad taught him at La Flèche, and no Jesuit casuistry could be more sophistical than the logic he finds goodenough for the purpose To argue, as he does, that the idea of a perfect being, in his mind, can be explainedonly by its proceeding from such a being as its creator is already sufficiently audacious But this feat is farsurpassed by his famous ontological proof of Theism A triangle, he tells us, need not necessarily exist; but,assuming there to be one, its three angles must be equal to two right angles With God, on the other hand, to

be conceived is to be; for, existence being a perfection, it follows, from the idea of a perfect Being, that hemust exist The answer is more clear and distinct than any of Descartes's demonstrations Perfection is

affirmed of existing or of imaginary subjects, but existence is not a perfection in itself

A third argument for Theism remains to be considered Descartes asks how he came to exist Not by his ownact; for on that hypothesis he would have given himself all the perfections that now he lacks; nor from anyother imperfect cause, for that would be to repeat the difficulty, not to solve it Besides, the simple

continuance of his existence from moment to moment needs an explanation For time consists of an infinity ofparts, none depending in any way on the others; so that my having been a little while ago is no reason why Ishould be now, unless there is some power by which I am created anew Here we must observe that Descartes

is playing fast and loose with the law of causation By what he calls the light of nature in other words, thelight of Greek {40} philosophy things can no more pass into nothing than they can come out of it Moreover,the difficulty is the same for my supposed Creator as for myself We are told that thought is a necessaryperfection of the divine nature But thinking implies time; therefore God also exists from moment to moment

How, then, can he recover his being any more than we can? The answer, of course, would be: because he isperfect, and perfection involves existence Thus the argument from causation throws us back on the so-calledontological argument, whose futility has already been shown.

This very idea of perfection involves us in fresh difficulties with the law of causation A perfect Being might

be expected to make perfect creatures which by hypothesis we are not Descartes quite sees this, and onlyescapes by a verbal quibble Our imperfections, he says, come from the share that Nothingness has in ournature Once allow so much to the creative power of zero, and God seems to be a rather gratuitous postulate.After proving to his own satisfaction the existence of the soul and of God, Descartes returns to the

starting-point of his whole inquiry that is, the reality of the material world and of its laws And now histheology supplies him with a short and easy method for getting rid of the sceptical doubts that had troubledhim at first He has a clear and distinct idea of his own body and of other bodies surrounding it on all sides asextended substances communicating movements to one another And he has a tendency to accept whatever isclearly and distinctly conceived by him as true But to suppose that God created that tendency with the

intention of deceiving him would argue a want of veracity in the divine nature incompatible with its {41}perfection Such reasoning obviously ignores the alternative that God might be deceiving us for our good Orrather what we call truth might not be an insight into the nature of things in themselves, but a correct

judgment of antecedents and consequents Our consciousness would then be a vast sensori-motor machineryadjusted to secure the maintenance and perfection of life

Descartes, as a mathematician, places the essence of Matter or Body in extension Here he agrees with another

mathematical philosopher, Plato, who says the same in his Timæus So far the coincidence might be

accidental; but when we find that the Frenchman, like the Greek, conceives his materialised space as beingoriginally divided into triangular bodies, the evidence of unacknowledged borrowing seems irresistible themore so that Huyghens mentions this as customary with Descartes

The great author of the Method and the Meditations for, after every critical deduction, his greatness as a

thinker remains undoubted contributed nothing to ethics Here he is content to reaffirm the general

conclusions of Greek philosophy, the necessary superiority of mind to matter, of the soul to the body, of spirit

to sense He accepts free-will from Aristotle without any attempt to reconcile it with the rigid determinism ofhis own mechanical naturalism At the same time there is a remarkable anticipation of modern psychology inhis doctrine of intellectual assent as an act of the will When our judgments go beyond what is guaranteed by aclear and distinct perception of their truth there is a possibility of error, and then the error is our own fault, theprecipitate conclusion having been a voluntary act Thus human free-will intervenes to clear God of all {42}responsibility for our delusions as well as for our crimes

MALEBRANCHE

Pascal, we are told, could not forgive Descartes for limiting God's action on the world to the "initial fillip" bywhich the process of evolution was started Nevertheless, Pascal's friends, the Jansenists, were content toadopt Cartesianism as their religious philosophy, and his epigram certainly does not apply to the next

distinguished Cartesian, Arnold Geulincx (1625-1669), a Fleming of Antwerp Unfortunate in his life, thiseminent teacher has of all original thinkers received the least credit for his services to metaphysics fromposterity, being, outside a small circle of students, still utterly unknown to fame Geulincx is the author of atheory called Occasionalism Descartes had represented mind, which he identified with Thought, and matter,which he identified with Extension, as two antithetical substances with not a note in common Nevertheless,

he supposed that communications between them took place through a part of the brain called the pineal body.Geulincx cut through even this narrow isthmus, denying the possibility of any machinery for transmittingsensible images from the material world to our consciousness, or volitions from the mind to the limbs How,then, were the facts to be explained? According to him, by the intervention of God When the so-called organs

of sense are acted on by vibrations from the external world, or when a particular movement is willed by the

mind, the corresponding mental and material modifications are miraculously produced by the exercise of his

omnipotence; and it is because these events occur on occasion of signals of which they {43} are not the

effects but the consequents that the theory has received the name of Occasionalism

The theory, as Geulincx formulated it, seems at first sight simply grotesque; and from a religious point ofview it has the additional drawback of making God the immediate executor of every crime committed by man.Nevertheless, it is merely the logical application of a principle subsequently admitted by profound thinkers ofthe most opposing schools namely, that consciousness cannot produce or transmit energy, combined with thebelief in a God who does not exist for nothing Even past the middle of the nineteenth century many Englishand French naturalists were persuaded that animal species to the number of 300,000 represented as manydistinct creative acts; and at least one astronomer, who was also a philosopher, declared that the ultimateatoms of matter, running up to an immeasurably higher figure, "bore the stamp of the manufactured article."

The capture of Cartesianism by theology was completed by Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715) This

accomplished writer and thinker, dedicated by physical infirmity to a contemplative life, entered the Oratory

at an early age, and remained in it until his death Coming across a copy of Descartes's Treatise on Man at

twenty-six, he at once became a convert to the new philosophy, and devoted the next ten years to its exclusive

study At the end of that period he published his masterpiece, On the Investigation of Truth (De la Recherche

de la Vérité, 1674), which at once won him an enormous reputation It was followed by other works of less

importance The legend that Malebranche's end was hastened by an argument with Berkeley has been

disproved {44}

Without acknowledging the obligation, Malebranche accepts the conclusions of Geulincx to the extent ofdenying the possibility of any communication between mind and matter Indeed, he goes further, and deniesthat one portion of matter can act on another But his real advance on Occasionalism lies in the question:How, then, can we know the laws of the material universe, or even that there is such a thing as matter at all?Once more God intervenes to solve the difficulty, but after a fashion much less crude than the miraculousapparatus of Geulincx Introspection assures us that we are thinking things, and that our minds are stored withideas, including the idea of God the all-perfect Being, and the idea of Extension with all the mathematical andphysical truths logically deducible therefrom We did not make this idea, therefore it comes from God, was inGod's mind before it was in ours Following Plotinus, Malebranche calls this idea intelligible Extension It isthe archetype of our material world The same is true of all other clear and distinct ideas; they are, as

Platonism teaches, of divine origin But is it necessary to suppose that the ideal contents of each separate soulwere placed in it at birth by the Creator? Surely the law of parsimony forbids It is a simpler and easier

explanation to suppose that the divine archetypal ideas alone exists, and that we apprehend them by a mysticalcommunion with the divine consciousness; that, in short, we see all things in God And in order to make thisvision possible we must, as the Apostle says, live, move, and have our being in God As a mathematician

would say, God must be the locus, the place of souls.

There is unquestionably something grandiose about this theory, which, however, has the defect in orthodox{45} opinion of logically leading to the Pantheism, held in abhorrence by Malebranche, of his greater

contemporary Spinoza And it is a suggestive circumstance that the very similar philosophy of the EternalConsciousness held by our countryman T H Green has been shown by the criticism of Henry Sidgwick toexclude the personality of God

SPINOZA

With the philosopher whom I have just named we come for the first time in modern history to a figure

recalling in its sustained equality of intellectual and moral excellence the most heroic figures of Hellenicthought Giordano Bruno we may, indeed, pronounce, like Lucan or Cranmer, "by his death approved," but hissubmission at Venice has to be set against his martyrdom at Rome; and if there is nothing very censurable inhis career as a wandering teacher, there is also nothing worthy of any particular respect Differences of

environment and heredity may no doubt be invoked to account for the difference of character; and in thephilosophy about to be considered the determining influence of such causes for the first time finds due

recognition; but on the same principle our ethical judgments also are determined by the very constitution ofthings

Baruch de Spinoza (1632-1677), born at Amsterdam, belonged to a family of Portuguese Jews, exiled onaccount of their Hebrew faith, in which also he was brought up Soon after reaching manhood he fell awayfrom the synagogue, preferring to share in the religious exercises of certain latitudinarian Christian sects.Spies were set to report his conversation, which soon supplied evidence of sufficiently heterodox opinions.{46} A sentence of formal excommunication followed; but modern research has discredited the story of anattempt to assassinate him made by an emissary of the synagogue After successfully resisting the claim of hissister and his brother-in-law to shut out the apostate from his share of the paternal inheritance, Spinoza

surrendered the disputed property, but henceforth broke off all communication with his family Subsequently

he refused an offer of 2,000 florins, made by a wealthy friend and admirer, Simon de Vries, as also a proposalfrom the same friend to leave him his whole fortune, insisting that it should go to the legal heir, Simon'sbrother Isaac The latter, on succeeding, wished to settle an annual pension of 500 florins on Spinoza, but thephilosopher would accept no more than 300 Books were his only luxury, material wants being supplied bypolishing glass lenses, an art in which he attained considerable proficiency But it was an unhealthy

occupation, and probably contributed to his death by consumption

Democracy was then and long afterwards associated with fanaticism and intolerance rather than with

free-thought in religion The liberal party in Dutch politics was the aristocratic party Spinoza sympathisedwith its leader, John de Witt; he wept bitter tears over the great statesman's murder; and only the urgentremonstrances of his friends, who knew what danger would be incurred by such a step, prevented him fromplacarding the walls of the Hague, where he then resided, with an address reproaching the infuriated peoplefor their crime

{47}

[Illustration: Reproduced (by permission) from Spinoza's Short Treatise on God, Man, and his Well-being, by

Professor A Wolf (A & C Black).]

{48}

In 1673 the enlightened ruler of the Palatinate, a brother of Descartes's Princess Elizabeth, offered Spinoza aprofessorship at Heidelberg, with full liberty to teach his philosophy But the pantheistic recluse wiselyrefused it Even at the present day such teaching as his would meet with little mercy at Berlin, Cambridge, orEdinburgh As it was, we have reason to believe that even in free Holland only a premature death saved him

from a prosecution for blasphemy, and his great work the Ethica could not with safety be published during his

lifetime It appeared anonymously among his posthumous works in November, 1677, without the name of thetrue place of publication on the title-page

Spinoza was for his time no less daring as a Biblical critic than as a metaphysician His celebrated Tractatus

Theologico-Politicus has for its primary purpose to vindicate the freedom of scientific thought against

ecclesiastical interference And this he does by drawing a trenchant line of demarcation between the

respective offices of religion and of philosophy The business of the one is to form the character and to purifythe heart, of the other to guide and inform the intellect When religion undertakes to teach scientific truth thevery ends for which it exists are defeated When theological dogmatism gains control of the Churches theworst passions are developed under its influence Instead of becoming lowly and charitable, men becomedisturbers of public order, grasping intriguers, bitter and censorious persecutors The claims of theology todictate our intellectual beliefs are not only mischievous, but totally invalid They rest on the authority of theBible as a revelation of God's will But no such supernatural revelation ever was or could be given Such

violation of the order of nature as the miracles recorded in Scripture history would be impossible And thenarratives recording them are discredited by {49} the criticism which shows that various books of the OldTestament were not written by the men whose names they bear, but long after their time As a Hebrew scholarSpinoza discusses the Jewish Scriptures in some detail, showing in particular that the Pentateuch is of a laterdate than Moses His limited knowledge of Greek is offered as a reason for not handling the New Testamentwith equal freedom; but some contradictions are indicated as disallowing the infallibility claimed for it At thesame time the perfection of Christ's character is fully acknowledged and accepted as a moral revelation ofGod.

Spinoza shared to the fullest extent, and even went beyond, Descartes's ambition to reconstruct philosophy on

a mathematical basis The idea may have come to him from the French thinker, but it is actually of much olderorigin, being derived from Plato, the leading spirit of the Renaissance, as Aristotle had been the oracle of thelater Middle Ages Now Plato's ideal had been to construct a philosophy transcending the assumptions or, as

he calls them, the hypotheses of geometry as much as those assumptions transcend the demonstrations ofgeometry; and this also was the ideal of Spinoza Descartes had been content to accept from tradition hisultimate realities, Thought, Extension, and God, without showing that they must necessarily exist; for hisproof of God's existence starts from an idea in the human mind, while Thought and Extension are not deduced

at all

To appreciate the work of the Hebrew philosopher, of the lonely muser, bred in the religion of Jahveh a nametraditionally interpreted as the very expression of absolute self-existence we must conceive him as startingwith a question deeper even than the Cartesian {50} doubt, asking not How can I know what is? but Why

should there be anything whatever? And the answer, divested of scholastic terminology, is: Because it is

inconceivable that there should be nothing, and if there is anything there must be everything This universe ofthings, which must also be everlasting, Spinoza calls God

The philosophy or religion for it is both which identifies God with the totality of existence was of longstanding in Greece, and had been elaborated in systematic detail by the Stoics It has been known for the lasttwo centuries under the name of Pantheism, a word of Greek etymology, but not a creation of the Greeksthemselves, and, indeed, of more modern date than Spinoza Historians always speak of him as a Pantheist,and there is no reason to think that he would have objected to the designation had it been current during hislifetime But there are important points of distinction between him and those who preceded or followed him inthe same speculative direction The Stoics differed from him in being materialists To them reality and

corporeality were convertible terms It seems likely that Hobbes and his contemporary, the atomist Gassendi,were of the same opinion, although they did not say it in so many words But Descartes was a strong

spiritualist; and Spinoza followed the master's lead so far, at any rate, as to give Thought at least equal realitywith matter, which he also identified with Extension It has been seen what difficulties were created by theradical Cartesian antithesis between Thought and Extension, or to call them by their more familiar

names mind and body, when taken together with the intimate association shown by experience to obtainbetween them; and also how {51} Geulincx and Malebranche were led on by the very spirit of philosophyitself almost to submerge the two disparate substances in the all-absorbing agency of God The obviouscourse, then, for Spinoza, being unfettered by the obligations of any Christian creed, was to take the lastremaining step, to resolve the dualism of Thought and Extension into the unity of the divine substance

In fact, the Hebrew philosopher does this, declaring boldly that Thought and Extension are one and the samething which thing is God, the only true reality of which they are merely appearances And, so far, he has hadmany followers who strive to harmonise the opposition of what we now call subject and object in the

synthesis of the All-One But he goes beyond this, expanding the conception of God or the Absolute to adegree undreamed of by any religion or philosophy formulated before or after his time God, Spinoza tells us,

is "a Substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses his absolute and eternal essence." But

of these attributes two alone, Thought and Extension, are known to us at present, so that our ignorance

infinitely exceeds our knowledge of reality His extant writings do not explain by what process he mounted to

this, the most dizzy height of speculation ever attained by man; but, in the absence of definite information,some guiding considerations suggest themselves as probable.

Bruno, whom Spinoza is held, on strong grounds, to have read, identified God with the supreme unifyingprinciple of a universe extending through infinite space Descartes, on the other hand, conceived God as athinking rather than as an extended substance But his school tended, as we saw, to conceive God as mediating{52} between mind and body in a way that suggested their real union through his power Furthermore, thehabit common to all Cartesians of regarding geometrical reasoning as the most perfect form of thought

inevitably led to the conception of thought as accompanying space wherever it went in fact, as stretching like

it to infinity Again, from the Cartesian point of view, that Extension which is the very essence of the materialworld, while it covers space, is more than mere space; it includes not only co-existence, but succession ortime that is, scientifically speaking, the eternal sequence of physical causes; or, theologically speaking, thecreative activity of God And reason or thought had also since Aristotle been more or less identified with thelaw of universal causation no less than with the laws of geometry

Thus, then, the ground was prepared for Spinoza, as a pantheistic monist, to conceive God under the twoattributes of Extension and Thought, each in its own way disclosing his essence as no other than infinite

Power But why should God have, or consist of, two attributes and no more? There is a good reason why we

should know only those two It is that we are ourselves modes of Thought united to modes of Extension, ofwhich our thoughts are the revealing ideas But it would be gross anthropomorphism to impose the limitations

of our knowledge on the infinite being of God, manifested through those very attributes as unlimited Power.The infinite of co-existence, which is space, the infinite of causal procession, which is time, suggest an

infinity of unimaginable but not inconceivable attributes of which the one divine substance consists And here

at last we get the explanation of why there should be such things as Thought and Extension at all They arethere simply because everything is If I grant {53} anything and I must, at least, grant myself I grant

existence, which, having nothing outside itself, must fill up all the possibilities of being which only excludethe self-contradictory from their domain Thus, the philosophy of Spinoza neither obliges him to believe in themonsters of mythology nor in the miracles of Scripture, nor in the dogmas of Catholic theology, nor even infree-will; nor, again, would it oblige him to reject by anticipation the marvels of modern science For,

according to him, the impossibility of really incredible things could be deduced with the certainty of

mathematical demonstration from the law of contradiction itself

Hegel has given the name of acosmism, or negation of the world, to this form of pantheism, interpreting it as adoctrine that absorbs all concrete reality and individuality in the absolute unity of the divine essence Nomisconception could be more complete Differentiation is the very soul of Spinoza's system It is, indeed,more open to the charge of excessive dispersion than of excessive centralisation Power, which is God'sessence, means no more than the realisation through all eternity of all possibilities of existence, with no end oraim but just the process of infinite production itself There is, indeed, a nominal identification between thematerial processes of Extension and the ideal processes of Thought But this amounts to no more than are-statement in abstract terms of the empirical truth that there is a close connection between body and mind.Like the double-aspect theory, the parallelistic theory, the materialistic theory, the theory of interaction, andthe theory of more or less complete reciprocal independence, it is a mere verbalism, telling us nothing that wedid not know before Or, if there {54} is more, it consists of the very questionable assumption that body andmind must come in somewhere to fill up what would otherwise be blank possibilities of existence And this,like other metaphysical assumptions, is an illegitimate generalisation from experience The ideas of space and

time as filled-up continua supply the model on which the whole universe must be constructed Like them, it

must be infinite and eternal, but, so to speak, at a higher power; as in them, every part must be determined bythe position of all other parts, with the determination put at a logical instead of at a descriptive value;

corresponding to their infinitely varied differentiation of position and quantity, there must be an infinite

differentiation of concrete content; and, finally, the laws of the universe must be demonstrable by the same à

priori mathematical method that has been so successfully applied to continuous quantity.

The geometrical form into which Spinoza has thrown his philosophy unfortunately restricts the number ofreaders always rather small that it might otherwise attract People feel themselves mystified, wearied, andcheated by the appearance, without the reality, of logical demonstration; and the repulsion is aggravated bythe barbarous scholasticism with which unlike Bacon, Hobbes, and Descartes he peppers his pages Yet, likethe Greek philosophers, he is much more modern, more on the true line of developing thought than they are.But to get at the true kernel of his teaching we must, like Goethe, disregard the logical husks in which it iswrapped up And, as it happens, Spinoza has greatly facilitated this operation by printing his most interestingand suggestive discussions in the form of Scholia, Explanations, and Appendices Even {55} these are noteasy reading; but, to quote his own pathetic words, "If the way of salvation lay ready to hand, and could befound without great toil, would it be neglected by nearly everyone? But all glorious things are as difficult asthey are rare."

Some of his expositors have called Spinoza a mystic; and his philosophy has been traced, in part at least, tothe mystical pantheism of certain medieval Jews In my opinion this is a mistake; and I will now proceed toshow that the phrases on which it rests are open to an interpretation more consistent with the rational

foundations of the whole system

The things that have done most to fasten the character of a mystic on Spinoza are his identification of virtuewith the knowledge and love of God, and his theory so suggestive of Christian theology at its highest

flight that God loves himself with an infinite love That, like Plato and Matthew Arnold, he should valuereligion as a means of popular moralisation might seem natural enough; but not, except from a mysticalmotive, that he should apparently value morality merely as a help to the religious life On examination,however, it appears that the beatific vision of this pantheist offers no experience going beyond the limits ofnature and reason Since God and the universe are one, to know God is to know that we are, body and soul,necessary modes of the two attributes, Extension and Thought, by which the infinite Power which is theessence of the universe expresses itself for us To love God is to recognise our own vitality as a portion of thatpower, welcoming it with grateful joy as a gift from the universe whence we come And to say that God loveshimself with an infinite love is merely to say that the attribute of Thought eternally divides itself among aninfinity of {56} thinking beings, through whose activity the universe keeps up a delighted consciousness ofitself

Spinoza declares by the very name of his great work that for him the philosophical problem is essentially aproblem of ethics, being, indeed, no other than the old question, first started by Plato, how to reconcile

disinterestedness with self-interest; and his metaphysical system is really an elaborate mechanism for provingthat, on the profoundest interpretation, their claims coincide His great contemporary, Hobbes, had taught thatthe fundamental impulse of human nature is the will for power; and Spinoza accepts this idea to the fullestextent in proclaiming Power to be the very stuff of which we and all other things are made But he partscompany with the English philosopher in his theory of what it means On his view it is an utter illusion tosuppose that to gratify such passions as pride, avarice, vanity, and lust is to acquire or exercise power Forstrength means freedom, self-determination; and no man can be free whose happiness depends on a fortuitouscombination of external circumstances, or on the consent of other persons whose desires are such as to set up

a conflict between his gratification and theirs Real power means self-realisation, the exercise of that facultywhich is most purely human that is to say, of Thought under the form of reason

In pleading for the subordination of the self-seeking desires to reason Spinoza repeats the lessons of moralphilosophy in all ages and countries since its first independent constitution In connecting the interests ofmorality with the interests of science as such, he follows the tradition of Athenian thought In interpretingpantheism as an ethical enthusiasm of the universe he returns to the creed of Stoicism, and {57} strikes thekeynote of Wordsworth's loftiest poetry In fixing each man's place in nature as one among the infinite

individuations of divine power he repeats another Stoic idea with this difference, however, that among theStoics it was intimately associated with their teleology, with the doctrine that everything in nature has afunction without whose performance the universe would not be complete; whereas Spinoza, following Bacon

and Descartes, utterly abjures final causes as an anthropomorphism, an intrusion of human interests into auniverse whose sole perfection is to exhaust the possibilities of existence And herein lies his justification ofevil which the Stoics could only defend on aesthetic grounds as enhancing the beauty of moral heroism bycontrast and conflict "If I am asked," he says, "why God did not create all men of such a character as to beguided by reason alone, my answer is because he had materials enough to create all things from the highest tothe lowest degree of perfection." Perfection with him meaning reality, this account of evil and of erroralso points to the theory of degrees of reality, revived and elaborated in our own time by Mr F H Bradley,involving a correlative theory of illusion Now, the idea of illusion, although older than Plato, was first

applied on a great scale in Plato's philosophy, of whose influence on seventeenth-century thought this is notthe only example We shall find it to some extent countervailed by a revived Aristotelian current in the work

of the metaphysician who now remains to be considered

LEIBNIZ

G W Leibniz (1646-1716), son of a professor at the University of Leipzig, is marked by some of the

distinguishing intellectual characters of the German genius {58} Far more truly than Francis Bacon, this mantook all knowledge for his province At once a mathematician, a physicist, a historian, a metaphysician, and adiplomatist, he went to the bottom of whatever subject he touched, and enriched all his multifarious studieswith new views or with new facts And as with other great countrymen of his, the final end of all this curiosityand interest was to combine and reconcile One of his ambitions was to create a universal language of

philosophy, by whose means its problems were to be made a matter of mathematical demonstration; another

to harmonise ancient with modern speculation; a third the most chimerical of all to compose the differencesbetween Rome and Protestantism; a fourth partly realised long after his time to unite the German Calvinistswith the Lutherans In politics he tried, with equal unsuccess, to build up a Confederation of the Rhine as abarrier against Louis XIV., and to divert the ambition of Louis himself from encroachments on his neighbours

to the conquest of Egypt

It seems probable that no intellect of equal power was ever applied in modern times to the service of

philosophy And this power is demonstrated, not, as with other metaphysicians, by constructions of more orless contestable value, however dazzling the ingenuity they may display, but by contributions of the first order

to positive science It is now agreed that Leibniz discovered the differential calculus independently of

Newton; and, what is more, that the formulation by which alone it has been made available for fruitful

application was his exclusive invention In physics he is a pioneer of the conservation of energy In geology

he starts the theory that our planet began as a glowing molten mass derived from the sun; and the modern{59} theory of evolution is a special application of his theory of development

Intellect alone, however, does not make a great philosopher; character also is required; and Leibniz's characterwas quite unworthy of his genius Ambitious and avaricious, a courtier and a time-server, he neither madetruth for its own sake a paramount object, nor would he keep on terms with those who cherished a noblerideal After cultivating Spinoza's acquaintance, he joined in the cry of obloquy raised after his death, and wasmean enough to stir up religious prejudice against Newton's theory of gravitation Of the calamity that

embittered his closing days we may say with confidence that it could not possibly have befallen Spinoza Onthe accession of the Elector of Hanover to the English crown as George I., Leibniz sought for an invitation tothe Court of St James Apparently the prince had not found him very satisfactory as a State official, and hadreason to believe that Leibniz would have liked to exchange his office of historiographer at Hanover for abetter appointment at Vienna Greatness in other departments could not recommend one whom he knew only

as a negligent and perhaps unfaithful servant to the favour of such an illiterate master Anyhow, the Englishappointment was withheld, and the worn-out encyclopædist succumbed to disease and vexation combined.The only mourner at his funeral was his secretary, Eckhardt, who hastened to solicit the reversion of theoffices left vacant by his chief's decease

A single theory of Leibniz has attained more celebrity than any one utterance of any other philosopher; but

that fame is due to the undying fire in which it has been enveloped by the mocking irony of Voltaire {60}Everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds Such is the famous text as a satire on which

Candide was composed Yet whatever value Voltaire's objections to optimism may possess tells nearly as

much against Voltaire himself as against his unfortunate butt For, after all, believing as he did in a God whocombined omnipotence with perfect goodness he could not any more than Leibniz evade the obligation of

reconciling the divine character with the divine work On à priori grounds the German philosopher seems to

have an incontrovertible case A perfect Being must have made the best possible world The only question iswhat we mean by goodness and by possibility Spinoza had solved the problem by identifying goodness withexistence It is enough that the things we call evil are possible; the infinite Power of nature would be a

self-contradiction were they not realised Leibniz rejects the pantheistic position in terms, but nearly admits it

in practice Evil for him means imperfection, and if God made a world at all it was bound to be imperfect Thenext step was to call pain an imperfection, which suggests a serious logical deficiency in the optimist; for,although in certain circumstances the production of pain argues imperfection in the operator, we are notentitled to argue that wherever there is pain there must be imperfection Another plea is the necessity of pain

as a punishment for crime, or, more generally, as a result of moral freedom Such an argument is only open tothe believers in free-will A world of free and responsible agents, they urge, is infinitely more valuable than aworld of automata; and it is not too dearly purchased even at the cost of such suffering as we witness Theargument is not very convincing; for liberty of choice {61} in a painless world is quite conceivable But, be it

a good or bad argument, although it might appeal to Voltaire, who believed in free-will, it could not decently

be used by Leibniz, who was a determinist of the strictest type To make this clear we must now turn to hismetaphysical system

Bacon, Descartes, and Spinoza, disagreeing widely on other subjects, were agreed in discountenancing thestudy of final causes: Bacon, apparently, from dislike of the idea that the perfect adaptation of all things to theservice of man rendered superfluous any efforts to make them more serviceable still; Descartes from hisdevotion to the mathematical method which was more applicable to a system of mechanical causation;

Spinoza for the same reason, and also from his disbelief in a personal God Leibniz, on the contrary, felt

deeply impressed by a famous passage in Plato's Phædo, where Socrates, opposing the philosophy of

teleology to the philosophy of mechanism, desiderates an explanation of nature as designed with a view to thehighest good But Leibniz did not go so far as Plato Mediating between the two methods, he taught that all isdone for the best, but also that all is done through an unbroken series of efficient causes At the same time,these causes are only material in appearance; in reality they are spiritual beings There is no such thing as deadmatter; the universe consists of living forces all through The general idea of force probably came from thatinfinite Power of which, according to Spinoza, the whole universe is at once the product and the expression;

or it may have been suggested by Plato's incidental identification of Being with Action But Leibniz found histype of force in human personality, which, following the lead of Aristotle {62} rather than of Plato, he

conceived as an Entelechy, or realised Actuality, and a First Substance After years of anxious reflection hechose the far happier name of Monad, a term originally coined by Bruno, but not, as would appear, directlyborrowed from him by the German metaphysician

According to Leibniz, the monads or ultimate elements of existence are constituted by the two essentialproperties of psychic life, perception and appetency In this connection two points have to be made clear

What he calls bare monads i.e., the components of what is known as inorganic matter although percipient, are not conscious of their perceptions; in his language they do not apperceive And he endeavours to prove

that such a mentality is possible by a reference to our own experience We hear the roaring of waves on theseashore, but we do not hear the sound made by the falling of each particle of water And yet we certainlymust perceive it in some way or other, since the total volume of sound is made up of those inaudible impacts

He overlooks the conceivable alternative that the immediate antecedent of our auditory sensations is a cerebraldisturbance, and that this must attain a certain volume in order to produce an effect on our consciousness Theother point is that the appetency of a monad does not mean an active impulse, but a search for more and moreperceptions, a continuous widening of its cognitive range In short, each monad is a little Leibniz for everincreasing the sum of its knowledge

At no stage does that knowledge come from experience The monad has no windows, no communication ofany kind with the external world But each reflects the whole universe, knowing what it knows by {63} mereintrospection And each reflects all the others at a different angle, the angles varying from one another byinfinitesimal degrees, so that in their totality they form a continuous series of differentiated individuals Andthe same law of infinitesimal differentiation is observed by the series of progressive changes through whichthe monads are ever passing, so that they keep exact step, the continuity of existence being unbroken in theorder of succession as in the order of co-existence Evidently there is no place for free-will in such a system;and that Leibniz, with his relentless fatalism, should not only admit the eternal punishment of predestinedsinners, but even defend it as morally appropriate, obliges us to condemn his theology as utterly irrational orutterly insincere.

In this system animal and human souls are conceived as monads of superior rank occupying a central andcommanding position among a multitude of inferior monads constituting what we call their bodies, and

changing pari passu with them, the correspondence of their respective states being, according to Leibniz, of

such a peculiarly intimate character that the phenomena of sensation and volition seem to result from a causalreaction instead of from a mechanical adjustment such as we can imagine to exist between two clocks soconstructed and set as to strike the same hour at the same time This theory of the relations between body andsoul is known to philosophy as the system of pre-established harmony

It may be asked how every monad can possibly reflect every other monad when we do not know what ispassing in our own bodies, still less what is passing all over the universe The answer consists in a convenientdistinction between clear and confused {64} perceptions, the one constituting our actual and the other ourpotential knowledge A more difficult problem is to explain how any particular monad Leibniz or

another can consistently be a monadologist rather than a solipsist believing only in its own existence Here,

as usual, the Deus ex Machina comes in Following Descartes, I think of God as a perfect Being whose idea

involves his existence, with, of course, the power, will, and wisdom to create the best possible world auniverse of monads which, again, by its perfect mutual adjustments, proves that there is a God A moreserious, and indeed absolutely insuperable, objection arises from the definition of the monads as nothing butmutually reflecting entities For even an infinity of little mirrors with nothing but each other to reflect must atonce collapse into absolute vacuity And with their disappearance their creator also disappears God, thesupreme monad, we are told, has only clear perceptions; but the clearness is of no avail when he has nothing

to perceive but an absolute blank Leibniz rejected the objectivity of time and space; yet the hollow infinity ofthose blank forms seems, in his philosophy, to have reached the consciousness of itself

* * * * *

{65}

CHAPTER III.

THE THEORISTS OF KNOWLEDGE

LOCKE, BERKELEY, HUME, KANT

Epistemology, or theory of knowledge, did not begin in modern times Among the Greeks it goes back, atleast, to Empedocles, and figures largely in the programmes of the later schools And Descartes's universaldoubt seems to give the question, How can we be sure of anything? a foremost place in speculation But thesingular assurance with which the Cartesian metaphysicians presented their adventurous hypotheses as

demonstrated certainties showed that with them the test of truth meant whatever told for that which, on othergrounds, they believed to be true In reality, the thing they called reason was hardly more than a covert appeal

to authority, a suggestion that the duty of philosophy was to reconcile old beliefs with new And the last greatdogmatist, Leibniz, was the one who practised this method of uncritical assumption to the utmost extent.LOCKE

It is the peculiar glory of John Locke (1632-1704) to have resumed that method of doubt which Descartes hadattempted, but which his dogmatic prepossessions had falsified almost at the first start This illustrious thinker

is memorable not only for his services to speculation, but for the example of a genuinely philosophic life {66}entirely devoted to truth and good a character in which personal sweetness, simplicity, and charm werecombined with strenuous, disinterested, and fearless devotion to the service of the State Locke was a Whig

when Whiggism meant advanced Liberalism in religion and politics, and when that often meant a choice

between exile and death Thus, after the fall of his patron, Lord Shaftesbury, the philosopher had to takerefuge in Holland, remaining there for some years, lying hid even there for some time to escape an extradition

order for which the Government of James II had applied It was in Holland that he wrote the Essay

Concerning Human Understanding.

This revolutionist in thought was no solitary recluse, but, in the best sense, a thorough man of the world.Educated at Westminster and Christ Church, he had, in the German poet's phrase, the supreme happiness ofcombining the seriousness of an enthusiast with the sagacity of a statesman, so that great statesmen recognisedhim as one of themselves With the triumph of the Whig cause at a time when diplomacy demanded theutmost tact and skill, it was proposed to send Locke as Ambassador to the Court of Brandenburg, and, as thatwould not have suited his sober habits, to the Court of Vienna Weak health obliging him to decline this also,

he received office in the Ministry at home, taking a department where business talents were eminently

required In that capacity he bore a leading part in the restoration of the coinage, besides inspiring the

Toleration Act and the Act for Unlicensed Printing Even the wisest men make mistakes; and it must benoticed with regret that Locke's theory of toleration excluded Roman Catholics on the one side and atheists onthe other the former because their {67} creed made persecution a duty, the latter because their want of acreed left them no sanction for any duties whatever To say that Locke had not our experience does not excuse

him, for in both cases the expediency of toleration can be proved à priori Romanists must be expected to

suppress a heresy whose spokesman declares that when he has the power he will suppress their Church; and, ifatheists are without moral principle, they will propagate, under cover of orthodoxy, negations that they are notallowed openly to profess

Locke was brought up by a Puritan father; and, although in after life he wandered far from its doctrinal

standards, he no doubt always retained a sense of that close connection between religion and morality whichPuritanism implies Telling about the train of thought that started his great Essay, he refers it to a conversationbetween himself and some friends, in which they "found themselves quickly at a stand by the difficulties thatrose on every side;" and, according to an intimate friend of his, the discussion turned "on the principles ofmorality and revealed religion." It then occurred to him that they should first ascertain "what objects theirunderstandings were or were not fitted to deal with." And the mottoes prefixed to the essay prove that the

results were of a decidedly sceptical cast Indeed, his successors, though not himself, were destined to developthem into what is now called Agnosticism.

We have further to note that, while his Continental rivals were mathematicians, our English philosopher neverwent deeply into mathematics, but was by calling a physician In this he resembles Aristotle and SextusEmpiricus among the Greeks; and so it is quite in order that, with the same sort of training, he should {68}adopt Aristotle's method of experience as against Platonic transcendentalism, and the sceptical relativism ofSextus as against the dogmatism of the schools

Locke begins his essay with a vigorous polemic against the doctrine of Innate Ideas The word "idea," as heuses it, is ambiguous, serving to denote perceptions, notions, and propositions; but this confusion is of nopractical importance, his object being to show that all our knowledge originates in experience; whereas thereigning belief was that at least the first principles of knowledge had a more authoritative, if not a mystical,source Hobbes had been beforehand with him in deriving every kind of knowledge from experience, but hadbeen content to assume his case; whereas Locke supports his by a formidable array of proofs The gist of hisargument is that intellectual and moral principles supposed to be recognised by all mankind from their infancyare admitted only by some, and by those only as the result of teaching

As we saw, the whole inquiry began with questions about religion and morality; and it is precisely in

reference to the alleged universality and innateness of the belief in God and the moral law that Locke is mostsuccessful And the more modern anthropology teaches us about primitive man, the stronger becomes the caseagainst the transcendental side in the controversy Where his analysis breaks down is in dealing with thedifficult and important ideas of Space, Time, Substance, and Causality with the fatal result that such

questions as, How is experience itself possible? or, How from a partial experience can we draw universal andnecessary conclusions? find no place in his theory of knowledge Of course, his contemporaries are open tothe same {69} criticism nor, indeed, had the time come even for the statement of such problems Meanwhile,the facility with which the founder of epistemology accepts fallacies whence Spinoza had already found hisway out shows how little he was master of his means According to Locke, it is "a certain and evident truththat there is an eternal, most powerful, and most knowing being, which whether anyone will please to callGod it matters not." On examination the proof appears to involve two unproved assumptions The first is thatnothing can begin to exist without a cause The second is that effects must resemble their causes And fromthese it is inferred that an all-powerful being must have existed from all eternity The alternative is overlookedthat a succession of more limited beings would answer the purpose equally well, while it would also be moreconsistent with our experience But a far more fatal objection to Locke's theism results from his secondassumption This, although not explicitly stated, is involved in the assertion that for knowledge such as wepossess to originate from things without knowledge is impossible For, on the same principle, matter musthave been made by something material, pain by something that is pained, and evil by something that is evil Itwould not even be going too far to say that by this logic I myself must have existed from all eternity; for tosay that I was created by a not-myself would be to say that something may come from nothing

We have seen how Locke refused toleration to atheists on the ground that their denial of a divine lawgiver andjudge destroys the basis of morality He did not, like Spinoza, believe that morality is of the nature of things.For him it is constituted by the will of God Possibly, if pressed, he might have explained {70} that whatatheism denies is not the rule of right, but the sanction of that rule, the fear of supernatural retribution Yetbeing, like Spinoza and Leibniz, a determinist, he should have seen that a creator who sets in motion the train

of causes and effects necessarily resulting in what we call good or bad human actions has the same

responsibility for those actions as if he had committed them himself To reward one of his passive agents and

to punish another would be grossly unjust and at the same time perfectly useless But how do we know that hewill, on any theory of volition, reward the good and punish the bad? "Because we have his word for it." Andhow do we know that he will keep his word? "Because he is all-good." But that, on Locke's principles, is pure

assumption; and God, being quite sure that he has no retribution to fear, must be even more irresponsible than

the atheist

The principle that nothing can come from nothing, so far from proving theism, leads logically either to

pantheism or to a much more thorough monadism than the system of Leibniz And, metaphysics apart, itconflicts with a leading doctrine of the essay that is the fundamental distinction between the primary and thesecondary qualities of matter We think of bodies as in themselves extended, resisting and mobile, but not inthemselves as coloured, sonorous, odorous, hot, cold, or sapid They cause our special sensations, but causethem by an unknown power Again we perceive or think we perceive both primary and secondary qualities

in close union as properties of a single object, and this object in which they jointly inhere is called a

substance And to the question, What is substance? Locke admits that he has no answer except something weknow not what He has returned to the agnostic standpoint of the {71} Cyrenaic school This something, foraught we know, might have created the world

Continental historians regard the whole rationalistic movement of the eighteenth century, or what in Germany

is called the Enlightenment (Aufklärung), as having been started by Locke But the sort of arguments that headduces for the existence of a God prove that in theology at least his rationalism had rather narrow limits.Both his theism and his acceptance of Christianity on the evidence of prophecy and miracles show no advance

on medieval logic In this respect Spinoza and Bayle (1622-1709) were far more in line with the modernmovement Still, assuming scripture as an authoritative revelation, Locke shows that, rationally interpreted, ityields much less support to dogmatic orthodoxy than English Churchmen supposed And whatever may havebeen the letter of his religious teaching, there can be little doubt that the English Deists, Toland, Shaftesbury,and Anthony Collins, represented its true spirit more faithfully than the philosopher himself

Representative government and the subordination of ecclesiastical to secular authority or, better still, theirseparation are both good things in themselves and favourable conditions to the life of reason Another

condition is that children should be trained to exercise their intelligence instead of relying blindly on

authority In these respects also Locke's writings acted powerfully on the public opinion of the next century,especially through the agency of French writers; France, as Macaulay justly claims, being the interpreterbetween England and the world Our present business, however, is not with the diffusion but the development

of thought, and to trace this we must return to British philosophy {72}

BERKELEY

George Berkeley (1684-1753) was born and educated in Ireland The fact is of no racial or national

importance, but interests us as accounting for his having received a better training in philosophy than at thattime was possible in England For the study of Locke, then proscribed at Oxford, had already been introducedinto Dublin when Berkeley was an undergraduate there; and it was as a critical advance on Locke that his first

publication, the New Theory of Vision (1709), was offered Next year came the epoch-making Principles of

Human Knowledge, followed in 1713 by the more popular Dialogues At twenty-nine his work was done, and

although he lived forty years longer, rising to be a Bishop in the Irish Church, after projecting a ChristianUtopia for the civilisation of the North American Indians that never came to anything, and practising "everyvirtue under heaven," he made no other permanent contribution to thought

Berkeley is at once a theorist of knowledge and a metaphysician, combining, in a way, the method of Lockewith the method of Descartes and his successors The popular notion of his philosophy is that it resolved theexternal world into a dream, or at least into something that has no existence outside our minds But this is anutter misconception, against which Berkeley constantly protested His quarrel was not with common sense,but with the theorists of perception To understand this we must return for a moment to Locke's teaching Itwill be remembered in what a tangle of difficulties the essay had left its author Matter had two sets of

qualities, primary and secondary, the one belonging to things in themselves, the other existing only {73} inour minds; yet both somehow combined in real substances independent of us, but acting on our senses

Substance as such is an unknown and unknowable postulate; nevertheless, we know that it was created byGod, of whom our knowledge is, if anything, inconveniently extensive Now Berkeley, to find his way out ofthese perplexities, begins by attacking the distinction between primary and secondary qualities For this

purpose his Theory of Vision was written It proves or attempts to prove that extension is not a real attribute

of things in themselves, but an intellectual construction, or what Locke would have called an "idea of

reflection." Till then people had thought that its objectivity was firmly established by the concurrent testimony

of two senses, sight and touch Berkeley shows, on the contrary, that visible and tangible extension are not thesame thing, that the sensations or, as he calls them, the ideas of sight and touch are two different languageswhose words we learn by experience to interpret in terms of each other without their being necessarily

connected A man born blind would not at first sight know how to interpret the visual signs of distance,direction, and magnitude; he would have to learn them by experience These, in fact, are ideal relations onlyexisting in the mind; and so we have no right to oppose mind as inextended to an extended or an externalworld

Having thus cleared the ground, our young idealist proceeds in his next and greatest work, Of the Principles of

Human Knowledge, to attack the problem from another side The world of objects revealed through sensation

and reflection is clearly no illusion, no creation of our own We find it there, changing, when it changes,without or even very much against our will {74} What, then, is its origin and nature? Locke's view, which isthe common view, tells us that it consists of material bodies, some animated and some not And matter, thesupposed substance of body, is made known to us by impressions on our organs of sense But when we try tothink of matter apart from these sensible qualities and the relations between them it vanishes into an empty

abstraction Now, according to Berkeley there are no abstract ideas i.e., no thoughts unassociated with some

mental image besides a mere word; and Matter or inanimate substance would be such an idea, therefore itdoes not exist There is nothing but mind and its contents what we call states of consciousness, what Lockeand Berkeley called ideas Whence, then, come the objects of our consciousness, and whither do they go when

we cease to perceive them? At this point the new metaphysical system intervenes Berkeley says that all thingssubsist in the consciousness of God, and by their subsistence his existence is proved The direct apprehension

of a reality that is not ourselves only becomes possible through what would be called in modern language asubjective participation in the divine consciousness, more feebly reflected, as would seem, in the memories,imaginations, and reasonings of our finite minds

In pursuing these wonderful speculations Berkeley deviated widely from the direct line of English philosophy,and it is difficult not to believe that the deflection was determined by the influence of Malebranche, especiallywhen we find that the writings of the Oratorian Father were included in his college studies Moreover, aparallel line of idealistic development derived from the same source was evolving itself at {75} the same time

in English thought John Norris (1657-1711), a correspondent of the Platonist Henry More, an opponent ofLocke, and a disciple of Malebranche, had himself found an enthusiastic admirer in Arthur Collier

(1680-1732), whose Clavis Universalis professed to be "a demonstration of the non-existence or impossibility

of an external world" (1713) Both Norris and Collier, like Malebranche and Berkeley, were Churchmen; but

so strong was the drift towards idealism that Leibniz, a layman and a man of science, contributed by hisMonadology to the same current Malebranche neither was nor could he be a complete idealist in the sense ofdenying the reality of matter; for the dogma of transubstantiation bound him, as a Catholic, to its acceptance,while Berkeley, Collier, and Leibniz, as Protestants, were under no such obligation His idealism agreed morenearly with the Neo-Platonic doctrine of Archetypes in the divine Reason among which Matter was one Onthe other hand, Berkeley probably borrowed from him the notion of a direct contact with God, the differencebeing that with the Cartesian it is conceived as an objective vision, with Locke's disciple as (if the expressionmay be permitted) a subjective con-consciousness Leibniz, again, while abolishing Matter, retains an externalworld composed indeed of spirits and so far immaterial, but existing independently of God

All these systems involve the negation of two fundamental scientific principles The first is that every changemust be explained by reference to an antecedent change to which it bears a strict quantitative relation Thesecond is that no particular change can be referred to another change as its necessary antecedent unless it can

be shown by experience that a precisely similar {76} couple of changes are, in fact, always so connected Let

me illustrate these principles by an example I leave a kettle full of cold water on the fire, and on returningafter a sufficient interval of time I find the water boiling Had I stayed by the fire and watched the process, my

kettle would a popular proverb to the contrary notwithstanding have certainly boiled as soon, but also nosooner for being helped by my consciousness The essential thing is that energy of combustion in the fireshould be turned into energy of boiling in the water Now, what is Berkeley's interpretation of the facts? Fire,

kettle, water, and ebullition are what in his writings are called "ideas" i.e., phenomena occasionally in my

mind, but always in God's mind And according to this view the necessary antecedent to the boiling of thewater is not the fire's burning, but God's consciousness of its burning, his perception being the essence of theoperation But it is proved by experience that neither my perception nor anyone else's ever made a single drop

of water boil In other words, perception is not in this instance a vera causa Why, then, should the perception

of any other mind, however exalted, have that effect?

Nor is this all How does Berkeley know that God exists? Because, he says, to exist is to be perceived, andtherefore for the universe to exist implies a universal Percipient But he got the idea of God from other men,who certainly did not come by it as a generalisation from their perceptions; they got it by generalising fromtheir voluntary actions, which do produce the changes that perception cannot produce It will be said thatvolitions and the feelings that prompt them exist only in consciousness In whose consciousness? In that of aspirit And what is spirit apart from {77} sensation, thought, feeling, and volition? Simply one of those

abstract ideas whose existence Berkeley himself denied

HUME

The next step in the evolution of English thought was to consist in a return to Locke's method, involving acomplete breach with seventeenth-century Platonism, and with the Continental metaphysics that it had

inspired This decisive movement was effected by one in whom German criticism has recognised the greatest

of all British philosophers David Hume (1711-1776) was born and bred at Edinburgh, which also seems to

have been through life his favourite residence But his great work, the Treatise on Human Nature, was written

during a stay in France, between the ages of twenty-three and twenty-six Thus his precocity was even greaterthan Berkeley's Indeed, such maturity of thought so early reached is without a parallel in history But Hume'sstyle had not then acquired the perfection the inimitable charm, Kant calls it of his later writings; and,whether for this or for other reasons, the book, in his own words, "fell dead-born from the press." In middlelife the office of librarian of the Advocates' Library at Edinburgh gave him access to the materials for his

History of England, which proved a source of fame and profit A profound historical scholar, J S Brewer,

tells us that Hume "possessed in a pre-eminent degree some of the highest excellences of a historian." Otherhistorians have treated their subjects philosophically; he furnishes the sole instance of a great speculativegenius who has also produced a historical masterpiece of the first order But morally it is a blot on his fame It

is sad that a philosopher should have deliberately perverted the truth, that one who has {78} [Illustration:DAVID HUME.] performed priceless services to freedom of thought should have made himself the apologist

of clericalising absolutism, and, still more, that a master of English played this part to some extent throughhatred of the great English people engendered by disappointed literary ambition It may be mentioned,

however, as a possible extenuation that towards the middle of the eighteenth century the highest Englishability had thrown itself, with few exceptions, on the Tory side It must be mentioned {79} also that in privatelife Hume's character was entirely admirable cheerful, generous, and gentle, without a frailty and without astain His opinions were unpopular; but his life offered no handle for obloquy, although his studious

retirement was more than once exchanged for the responsibilities of political office, and the freedom frompedantry so conspicuous in his writings bears witness to habits of well-bred social intercourse

Hume's philosophy is best understood when we consider it as, in the first place, a criticism of Berkeley, just asBerkeley's had been a criticism of Locke It will be remembered that the founder of subjective idealismdiscarded the notion of material substance as an "abstract idea," an unintelligible figment devoid of anysensuous or imaginative content The only true substances are the subjects of what we call experience

communicating through sensation with God, the infinite spirit whose eternal consciousness is reality itself.Hume applied the same tests to spiritual substance, and found that it equally disappeared under his

introspective analysis He begins by dividing the contents of consciousness into two classes, impressions and